Nairi: Tower of Shirin

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Nairi is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2018. In this game, players follow the story of a young girl who is awakened late at night and hurriedly rushed to safety as the royal guard hunts her for reasons unknown. Over the course of Nairi’s adventure, she must escape this and other precarious situations, discover what has become of her parents, and possibly even discover her connection to an ancient mystery.

Nairi’s presentation is wonderful, with a beautiful hand-drawn storybook look to it Characters are cartoonish, but lovingly painted with a real sense of this world having its own unique culture. This is backed by a lovely subdued acoustic soundtrack, though sadly I don’t have any examples I can point to at this time. In any case, while this game may be designed to look kid-friendly, it is nevertheless still beautiful to look at.

However, perhaps even nicer than the artwork is this game’s story and characters, which convey a good sense of adventure and even a bit of peril, while still remaining very kid-friendly. The tone of this game reminded me very much of the Narnia books, complete with an opening straight out of Prince Caspian, and a cast of anthropomorphic animals, all with vibrant personalities.

As for the gameplay here, this is pretty standard Graphic Adventure stuff – interact with the environment, collect items, combine items, use items to get past puzzles, that sort of thing. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s decent enough. However, this game does a poor job giving the player an idea of the layout of the areas they pass through, making the necessary backtracking more tedious and frustrating than it needs to be.

There is one other element here I should touch on, and that is that Nairi does a good job supporting both the touchscreen and gyroscopic motion control, which both work fairly well here. However, I will fault the touchscreen just a bit – this is very much a game where you need to be checking all of the scenery looking for points you can interact with, and using the touchscreen means that you don’t have a cursor to indicate where you can interact with, and what parts of the screen lead to other areas, and accidentally tapping on one of these sections when you didn’t intend to can be annoying.

Overall, Nairi’s Graphic Adventure gameplay may be decent but unspectacular, but its characters, story, and presentation make it charming in a way that’s rare for the genre. It also doesn’t hurt that this game sells for a miniscule $5. If you’re a fan of Graphic Adventures looking for a fantasy story with some delightful characters and a fun adventurous tone, you’ll likely be pleased with Nairi: Tower of Shirin.

tl;dr – Nairi: Tower of Shirin is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure about a young girl who finds herself suddenly on the run from forces seeking to capture her, and trying to find answers both to her family’s wearabouts as well as her connection to an ancient mystery. The gameplay here is fairly standard for the genre, but the charming characters, story, and presentation make this well worth a look for fans of the genre, especially for the low $5 price tag.

Grade: B+

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